Public posts show the words people use when a task is slow, broken, expensive, or still manual. Those words can improve customer research, but they do not replace interviews.
This workflow builds a ranked customer pain-point list with source links and clear limits.
SocialListeningAPI searches public posts on Reddit, LinkedIn, X, Hacker News, TikTok, and YouTube for the phrases you choose and returns normalized records with source URLs.
Step 1: Search symptoms and workarounds
Create a SocialListeningAPI account and claim the 100 free credits. Write phrases that describe the problem before naming a solution:
spending hours checking brand mentionsmanual customer research spreadsheetmissed LinkedIn post about companysocial listening tool too expensivehow to search Reddit posts at scale
Add category and competitor searches later. Problem language usually gives cleaner research first.
Step 2: Search six public sources
for endpoint in \
reddit/search-posts \
linkedin/search-posts \
x/search-posts \
hackernews/search-posts \
tiktok/search-posts \
youtube/search-posts
do
curl --get "https://api.sociallisteningapi.com/api/v1/$endpoint" \
--data-urlencode 'query=manual customer research spreadsheet' \
--header 'x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY'
doneOne query across six sources costs 7 credits. The API introduction explains the shared social response. The MCP can collect the same records through Claude or ChatGPT.
Step 3: Keep the source context
Store the post text or title, source URL, platform, published date, query, and a short context note in an external database. Remove duplicate URLs before analysis.
Do not pull one sentence away from the task, product, or situation around it.
Step 4: Group customer pain points outside the API
Use an external LLM to suggest themes such as time, cost, missing data, setup, or trust. Then have a person check the groups and count unique sources for each theme.
Keep counterexamples and uncertainty beside each pain point. A loud post is still one source.
Step 5: Decide what to research next
Rank themes by unique sources, recency, severity, and fit with the product decision you are making. Use the strongest themes to prepare interview questions, prototype tests, or deeper research.
Conclusion
Treat the report as a map for the next customer conversations, not proof that everyone has the same problem.
A useful pain point includes the original wording, context, source count, examples, and limits.
Continue with Find Feature Requests Across Public Discussions.
